Easter treats

Well, we’ve bought our Easter eggs and Easter bilbies, and we’ve had plenty of Hot Cross Buns. I used to like those solid candy eggs when I was young, but they seem to have gone out of favour, and they’d probably be too sweet now anyway. Does anyone have any other seasonal treats they can recommend (or, for that matter, warn against).

our family tradition is to have easter bunny (ie rabbit – real rabbit, not chocolate) for a main meal sometime over easter. rabbit makes a good meal; one of our favourites is with prunes, and with mustard is a french classic. it fun to eat the rabbit, and outrages the more conservative easter observers!

The Easter bread is nice: Tsoureki I think it’s called, sweet but no over sweet – a bit like Panettone without the fruit – you can see it in Greek delis and bakeries with red eggs embedded in the crust.
Trouble with Tsoureki is that it is available when all the hot cross buns and chocolate eggs are – so I usually give it a miss because my consumption of sweet stuff is quite high enough.

A non-sweet eggy treat is chinese Tea eggs or Marble eggs, if you’re having a picnic you might like to try that. Brew up a viciously strong batch of black tea. Strain it into a saucepan and chuck in a few pieces of star anise and a few spoonfuls of soy. Hard boil eggs in this mixture and when they’re hard, take them out and gently crack them all over – but don’t peel them. Leave them to soak in the tea/soy mixture overnight. When you peel them, they’ll look like brown marble, and the saltiness of the soy/tea mixture is nice.

Stephen, my mother used to alternate between roasting and currying the rabbits my father would bring home to eat at odd times. Either way tasted excellent. Incidentally, eating rabbits is a resource-efficient alternative to sheeps and cows for people who accept the ecological arguments against eating meat but can’t bring themselves to convert wholesale to vegetarianism.

Incidentally, eating rabbits is a resource-efficient alternative to sheeps and cows for people who accept the ecological arguments against eating meat but canâ€™t bring themselves to convert wholesale to vegetarianism.
I’m one of those, and I love rabbit. Unfortunately, the kids think it’s gross. I think it’s because it’s become much less common since I was a kid myself. Once I served it up as “free range chicken”, got busted. I’ll never get away with that again. Unfortunately.

PM Lawrence, about a year ago I sent the following post to my colleagues at Griffith.

“I want to alert the faculty and animal rights activists to the inhumane practice of battery cat farming used by Hardy’s Wines.

“Last night, I noticed that bottles of Hardy’s Regional Reserve Chardonnay were on special at my local bottle shop at $5-99 each. I bought one, consumed the contents, and thereby discovered that this product is almost certainly produced using a cat battery.

“A cat battery is a large plant at establishments like Hardy’s Wines in which thousands of cats are kept confined in vast arrays where they are force-fed a copious liquid diet spiked with diuretics, and have tubes attached to their private parts which lead to collection vats from which products such as Hardy’s Regional Reserve Chardonnay are subsequently decanted.

“I have therefore commenced a consumer boycott of Hardy’s Regional Reserve Chardonnay, and urge others to do likewise. Apart from anything else, you will appreciate the convergence between your altruistic humanitarian obligations to the cats, and your enlightened self-interest in achieving drinking satisfaction and maintaining good health.”

I received a reply from a colleague, expressing outrage at the “stupid and barbaric practice” of battery cat farming, offering any support they could provide to my campaign for its eradication, and asking whether I had informed the RSPCA.

I thought about posting back to say that I was taking the piss with my original post, but I realised that such a reply would only create further confusion.